IBM Emerges in Amazon's Cloud

Big Blue is now providing images for Amazon's cloud. A cloud software-as-service (SaaS) for SUSE Linux, among other products, is to follow.

Free Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are now immediately available for a few IBM products so that testers and developers can work on applications in Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) environment. The first of these IBM products include DB2, Lotus, WebSphere and Informix.

IBM plans production versions as SaaS offerings in the near future, including for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and IBM's Tivoli service manager. In any case, additional licenses are required based on the processor unit value (PVU) of the number of virtual CPU core instances.